A Fine Balance

I have a little white bucket with a green lid. It lives underneath our kitchen sink and I’m always
happy to see it. It’s that one bin where the contents don’t leave our home. It’s the bin that helps
me feed the soil in which our delicious home produce grows. 

To me, throwing out compostable material is down right outrageous! Especially the stuff I paid
good money for. Turning compostable material into nutritious food for healthy plants is a no brainer, and now I’ve learnt how to do it, I can’t stop! I love it! So I am going to share how I do it — if you
aren’t composting already, you’ll see that it’s not hard.  

More often than not, when I visit someone’s home, I’ll come across a black bin in some forgotten corner of the backyard, full of grass clippings. It makes me wonder how many homes aren’t using these bins to their full potential. Home composting makes so much sense in terms of maximising
your investments of time, energy and of course money, so it seems silly to not get the most out of it.

I’ve been successfully composting at home for around five years now, but still feel like I’ve only
just started because it’s just as fun and interesting as it was when I made my first batch of proper compost. I couldn’t believe that that batch worked! I was truly amazed that six months of food and garden ‘waste’ had been magically transformed into this lush, deep brown, forest-smelling material. And to then put that on the garden and grow plants from it is such a great feeling. And the best
part is, I didn’t do that much.

I am a self proclaimed lazy gardener, I don’t wanna work too hard, I just want to have a good time, whatever I’m doing. I came to learn that composting or rather decomposition, happens naturally and that once you start, help comes naturally too — and in numbers! I learnt that most of the work is done by worms, bugs, micro-organisms, bacteria and fungi. A whole army of little creatures show up to help process all this material that we humans commonly regard as waste and throw away to landfill.

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My home set up

Our compost bin is one of those classic Kiwi black bins mentioned above — it’s 240L and we fill
it up in around 3–6 months. We have ours in a shady position under a tree. I’ve found that if the
bin gets too hot and the material inside dries out, then the composting process slows down and
can even completely stop. 

As this style of bin has an open bottom, the materials have direct contact with the ground.
Situating the bin underneath a tree means the biology around the tree’s root system, and the roots themselves, have direct access to the decomposing materials and resulting nutrients. This is also where a lot of the composting help comes from — in the form of those worms, micro-organisms,
and the good bacteria and fungi. When setting it up, I like to put a fine wire mesh down underneath the bin to prevent rodents from entering this composting zone. 

There are two parts to my composting process: filling the bin and the composting stage.
Let’s dive in...

What can be composted?

There are two main sources of materials for our compost bin. First up, we add the contents of
that little white bucket with the green lid that lives under our sink. It captures compostable
materials from the kitchen and house:‍

House compostables 

→ Cooked and raw plant-based meals and ingredients

→ Coffee and tea

→ Egg shells and torn-up egg cartons

→ Old flowers from vases

→ Toilet rolls and paper wrapping

→ Scrunched up newspapers and envelopes

→ Tissues

→ Hair from haircuts/brushes

I’ve left out meat and dairy as you can run into problems trying to home compost these things,
but that’s not to say there isn’t a way of processing them. Google ‘bokashi composting’ to learn
how to safely navigate home composting these materials.

The other source of material is from outside, things you can just chuck straight into your bin:‍

Outside compostables

→ Fruit and vegetable plants

→ Chopped up tree prunings

→ Fallen leaves, twigs and fruit

→ Weeds without seeds

Weeds with seeds create more weeds, so it’s better to leave them out of your compost bin. Don’t include too much large material — if it’s bigger than the palm of your hand, then chop it into smaller pieces. Large pieces take too long to break down.

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A recipe for success

I sometimes think making compost is like making a cake: there are wet ingredients and dry ingredients, and you mix it all up and leave it to cook. Easy. To make a really good cake, however, there are some important things to get right — like the ratio of wet and dry ingredients. It’s exactly
the same with making compost. 

Simply put, the wet ingredients are the fresh materials that have a high water content, like food scraps and vegetable plants. The dry ingredients are the older materials that have dried out and therefore have a low water content, making them woody and brittle, like fallen leaves and cardboard. Adding this dry material is important and helps your compost bin from smelling bad, and it also keeps the flies from taking over your bin. The best ratio is 50% wet and 50% dry, adding equal amounts of both as you’re filling your bin.

There are two other important elements in the composting process that you need to keep an
eye on — oxygen and moisture. Getting oxygen into your compost speeds up the decomposition
process and is achieved by mixing the ingredients together, just like mixing up the wet and dry
cake ingredients. I do this mixing part after the bin is full, however you can use a handy tool called
a compost aerator to get oxygen into your compost while you’re in the process of filling it. This tool takes the labour intensive part out of turning your compost with a garden fork, like I do. 

Keeping the materials moist is also very important. You don’t want a soaking wet bin otherwise
it will get smelly and gross, and you don’t want the bin to dry out either. This just emphasises the importance of adding equal amounts of wet and dry materials as you fill up your bin. Wetting your materials while you’re filling up your bin or adding more dry materials will help balance the ratio
if things start getting lopsided. 

I don’t know anyone that enjoys dry cake, so let’s try to keep that compost moist, New Zealand!

Once our bin is full, it’s time to stop adding material and assess the situation. What I like about
these bins is that I can pull the whole thing off when it’s full and have a look at the different
states of all the material that’s been added, not to mention seeing the huge and helpful army of decomposers! This is the ‘mixing of the cake’ part of the process. I give that baby a stir, often adding more wet or dry material if need be, before putting it back in the bin to let it sit for a week or two.
Then I assess the situation again, maybe give it another mix up and then let it cook and cool down until it’s ready to eat… I mean, use on the garden. 

There are lots of different recipes for composts (and cakes), but once you’ve made something
a few times, you kinda get the hang of what’s going on and you can rely on your senses for
a good outcome. Embrace the challenges of home composting! Don’t throw away your compostables to then go and buy store-bought compost for your garden. Make it instead!

If you want to go the extra mile then try putting your finished compost through a compost sieve
— you then get the chance to separate the usable compost from the big and undecomposed materials, and put that material into your next compost instead. It also gives you a chance to
remove any unwanted items that may have accidentally found their way into your compost, like plastic or cutlery. Check out Crafty Gatherer (craftygatherer.co.nz) for sieves, aerators and other compost goodness.‍

For more gardening content, follow Jim @gardennearsy

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By Jim Annear
Photography by ilk

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